Did you know that last week, the United States launched drone strikes in Waziristan and Yemen, killing several suspected terrorists?
Don’t feel bad if the answer is no; the attacks went largely unreported in the American news media, which has become so accustomed to unmanned bombings in the Middle East that they rarely warrant a mention… especially when the US is launching other wars in the region simultaneously.
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Luckily, though, John Oliver was paying attention, and on Sunday, he focused his weekly tragicomedy lesson on the practice of raining hell down from the sky from robot airplanes.
In classic Oliver fashion, he linked the sad and complex rules for drone strikes to beloved actor Harvey Keitel‘s testicles, in a surprisingly apt comparison.
“We’ve all seen them,” Oliver said. “And from, from a distance you think, ‘Well, I understand the contours of those.’ But if you were to really examine them, you’d discover that they’re actually lost in a haze of fuzziness and gray areas. Much like the rules for our drone strikes.”
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For example: In the story above, it says that the United States killed eight suspected militants during those bombings in Waziristan. Well, among the many scary things that Oliver took issue with during the segment was the fact that the US considers any able-bodied male in militant-controlled regions to be a militant, unless they have proof otherwise. Which, of course, makes their percentage-of-bad-guys-killed pretty darn high.
Another sad fact: A generation of children are being raised under deadly skies, learning to fear the sun’s rays, which guide predators through the blue sky.
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“Congratulations, everyone,” Oliver said. “We did it! We managed to make one of the last remaining universal symbols of pleasantness – blue sky – completely fucking terrifying. We did it! Woo!”
